23 As the sheer volume of large-scale unstructured data increases across various sectors of enterprise — media, healthcare, and more — so too does the need for scalable data management. Scality’s Chief Product Officer Paul Speciale sat down with Regalix TV’s Jessica Ly to talk about data storage, data management, and the role Scality plays in the burgeoning scene. Unstructured data is 80 percent of the data that needs to be managed, said Speciale. “We focus on the big customers,” he said, “like big banks, big media, big service providers. More recently, it’s been healthcare; hospitals have been a great market for us.” The last few years have seen a big shift from on-premise data management to multi-cloud solutions, said Speciale. The focus was on software that could make a system out of commodity hardware servers. “A few years ago a few (of our customers) told us, ‘That’s great, it works, but guess what? I have this thing coming at me called Amazon and Google and Azure,’” Speciale said. “‘How do I use it together with your system?’” The multi-cloud environment, then, is the result of companies wanting a data strategy that can work across storage media. Scality makes software that helps decide where to distribute the data. “Our long-term flagship product,” said Speciale, “is The Ring. That’s for on-premises data storage management. The newer product that came out of these demands is called Zenko.” This system decouples storage and the storage destination across different solutions, clouds, and on-premise devices. It’s based on the business requirements of each individual company. For example, there’s been a tremendous growth in medical imaging technology. “They run CAT scans and PET scans and medical digital X-Rays,” said Speciale. “They need to store it somewhere but the requirements are to not only store it somewhere but to keep multiple copies.” Sometimes a copy of the data needs to be out of the specific geographical area it was created in. The public cloud is great for that. Scality’s Zenko can move the data from on-premise storage to things like Microsoft Azure Blob storage, for example. [bctt tweet=”There’s been massive growth in medical imaging technology. CAT, PET scans and X-Rays contribute to massive unstructured data. “They need to store it somewhere but the requirements are to not only store it somewhere but to keep multiple copies,” says Scalty’s Speciale. ” username=”scality”] Even consumer tech is coming into its own, with massive data from things like health data gathered by wearables and smart phones. Or things like video and photos taken by the average consumer, which also must be backed up into perpetuity. Facial recognition and biometric authentication is another area that requires security and backup, said Speciale. Bottom line, the amount and sheer volume of data isn’t going to slow down any time soon. “I would say there’s no inhibitor in the size of the market of the growth of the data that we’re seeing,” Speciale said. How does a relatively small company like Scality compete with the tech giants? “We’re not going to be able to match up in terms of resources or spend,” said Speciale, “so the only thing we can do is be more agile and more focused.” Everyone in the company can focus on the same things, they’re not split among 10 or 20 different products. “(You) really start focusing the product on who you know your audience is,” Speciale said. “Obviously you need to find future markets and learn where you can expand, but it’s things like these marketing programs that target the use cases and the industries that we know are the right ones.” Watch the entire interview here: https://www.regalix.tv/asset/unstructured-data-storage-and-management-paul-speciale-chief-product-officer-scality
